“A Monet Christmas to all!”

Kate Bush has wished her followers a merry Christmas in a new message, by which she touches on conflict, developments in synthetic intelligence (AI) and what she discovered from seeing Monet’s work.

• RRAD MORE: Kate Bush – Rank The Albums

Within the prolonged message, she thanks followers for the assist for her new quick movie, Little Shrew, a black-and-white animation she wrote and directed in support of Conflict Youngster. “Little Shrew might be getting a bowl of particularly scrumptious earthworms this Christmas morning,” she stated.

Bush additionally mused upon the present fraught political state of affairs internationally however famous that she wished her Christmas message to be one in all positivity.

“It’s been one other yr of exceptionally darkish information. It simply retains getting worse, doesn’t it?” she wrote.

“The wars maintain raging. We helplessly stand and watch as these poor individuals are caught up within the horrors of all of it and naturally there are the kids…

“It’s arduous to not concentrate on the fear all of us really feel about these conflicts and the huge adjustments which are taking place round us, however I’d prefer to attempt to discover one thing constructive to say for this Christmas message:”

Bush stated that Christmas Eve was one in all her favorite days of the yr. “Once I was a toddler, it used to have a particular feeling,” she defined. “It even had a type of Christmas Eve odor… a combination of smoking coal fires and damp leaves, all bundled up in a drizzly English frozen fog. If I actually work on it, I can nonetheless summon it up on the day. I’m engaged on it now…”

She recalled seeing a brand new exhibition on Monet’s work and relating the French artist’s notion of industrialisation to fashionable anxieties round AI.

“Is that us? Standing in awe on the daybreak of AI, the image of modernity, as smog was for Monet at the moment within the newly industrial London? Will we solely see the twinkling gentle of the brand new invention, which so usually catches the attention of our creativeness… and what are these imprecise, darkish sardonic shapes we will see within the background, behind the theatrical gauze?” she wrote.

“It’s arduous to make them out, however might they be our human pods, like these from the Matrix, being readied for us by keen, playful digits? Or possibly they’re freshly painted bridges – sturdy, and lovingly constructed to hold us all right into a a lot longed-for new age of wholesome pondering?

“All might be revealed when the smog begins to clear.

“Merry Christmas everybody. I hope it’s a extremely joyful one for you all.”

Earlier this month, Bush signed a petition talking out in opposition to AI utilizing artists’ work with out permission.

The marketing campaign emerged earlier this yr and states that “the unlicensed use of inventive works for coaching generative AI is a serious, unjust risk to the livelihoods of the individuals behind these works, and should not be permitted”.

The petition at the moment has 36,000 signatures and reads that, with out authorities intervention, the observe creates “a serious, unjust risk to the livelihoods of the individuals behind these works”. You’ll be able to signal the petition and discover out extra here.

In different information, Bush lately stated that she has “numerous concepts” she desires to pursue now she is able to create new materials.

“I’ve been caught up doing quite a lot of archive work over the previous couple of years, redesigning our web site, placing a lyric guide collectively,” she defined.

“And I’m very eager to begin engaged on a brand new album after I’ve obtained this completed. I’ve obtained numerous concepts and I’m actually wanting ahead to getting again into that inventive area, it’s been a very long time.”

Requested if it was one thing she had been hoping to do for some time, Bush replied: “Sure it’s, actually. Notably the final yr, I’ve felt actually prepared to begin doing one thing new.”